


fifteen ways to become the biggest fuck-up in the galaxy

by spanish_sahara



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 02:32:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13354626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spanish_sahara/pseuds/spanish_sahara
Summary: Your face is an open wound—fear clots in the quivering of your mouth, exhaustion in the shadows under your eyes. You are bleeding, you have always been bleeding; you bleed when your father finds you and peels open the gauze, you bleed when the girl sees the fester and rot and splits you open anew. It doesn’t stop.





	fifteen ways to become the biggest fuck-up in the galaxy

**Author's Note:**

> (cw: abuse, depictions of violence, mentions of genocide, all the awfulness that can be associated with boy-man-not-quite kylo ren)
> 
> based on daphne gottlieb's fifteen ways to stay alive, which is sublime!!! better writers have done their own versions of this in the past (see: gyzym's on britta perry, postcardmystery's on newton geiszler and hermann gottlieb), but i wanted to do my own for the worst fuck-up in the galaxy who i hold...dearly in my heart. unfortunately.

1\. Offer yourself to him—but only the parts that matter. Your hands, arms, feet, legs. Your head, if you wanted it to hurt enough. Offer these things to him because really, this is all you have, this desperate, tremulous violence, barely contained by the patchwork of scars and nerves and muscles you call your body. Do not offer him your heart; do not offer him your soul. Remember that the Supreme Leader does not want for that which he has already seized. 

 

2\. At first, wear the mask as if it’s a bandage. Your face is an open wound—fear clots in the quivering of your mouth, exhaustion in the shadows under your eyes. You are bleeding, you have always been bleeding; you bleed when your father finds you and peels open the gauze, you bleed when the girl sees the fester and rot and splits you open anew. It doesn’t stop. In the aftermath, you eventually decide to tear the whole wretched thing off and feel your skin gasping from the exposure. You press your fingers into the new tissue, shuddering. This is not healing. This mask, this—it has never been about healing. 

 

3\. Pretend to not remember the small things because it’s always the small things. It’s always the way your mother tucked your hair behind your ears, the way your father held you at arm’s length even when he brought you in for a hug, the way they never stopped calling you kid, even after. After— 

 

4\. Pretend that you can live in the after. 

 

5\. Offer yourself to the girl, without limitation or specification. Do not offer her to anything or anyone else. Scavengers, unlike the parts they forage from junkyards, would never allow themselves to be bartered. 

 

6\. Only kill when it’s personal—especially when it’s personal. Cut down the man who cites your past as a call for redemption, stab Han Solo because he is your father, bifurcate the Supreme Leader because he pretended to be. Think that you have slaughtered your uncle because he had thought to slaughter you; do not pull the trigger on your mother in a moment you have yet to deem strength or weakness. There are men, women, and children you ended in the space of a single command; there are planets you leveled by your choice as a bystander. These ones will never be wiped clean from your slate, as long as the Force shall live; for these faceless deaths, you shall be called murderer, war criminal. But the others, the ones you sought to stare down as you took their lives—for these ones, you will allow yourself to be called monster. 

 

7\. Don’t ever look back—except you do, you always do. Let the past die, you say, because the boy resides between the spaces of your ribcage and your body has become a mausoleum. Let the past die, you say to the girl who has none, who scavenged a self from the battered, broken things around her, who carries nothing but a hand-crafted staff on her shoulders. She doesn’t listen, looks back with every step she takes, but she stalks ahead of you anyways, world parting itself around her. You watch her in the ashes, the boy curled up inside of you rapturous. 

 

8\. Realize that every love you have ever had has been your shipwreck, has been your Death Star, has been the hand to wrap itself quietly around your throat. Your infatuation is an awful and fervent creature, you have always known, you have lived with its presence for years—but it is not until you meet the girl in the snow, all contempt and snarls and blinding purity, and something—shifts, in the creature. She strikes you down without remorse, and you realize that the day where this all comes to an end is finally, finally coming. The creature has never been more in love, more wrecked. 

 

9\. Use your bones as a battering ram, as a wall of defense. Your teeth rattle between your cheeks with each fracture, each blow for blow, but if this is the only intimacy you receive in your small, fuck-up of a life—so be it. 

 

10\. Imagine all the different ways in which you could come home. It could end with a son on his knees before the woman whose love he took. It could end as an act of justice, the executioner’s face blurry but the sting of the guillotine all the same. It could end with just a litany of fuck-ups by the irredeemable fuck-up, blind until the end, berserk, malevolent, and dying for a throne made of ashes and bone. Or it could end as you know you want it to end—with a thank you, with a sigh, somewhere in the forest or snow or rain, with the sword of the girl you love running through your heart. Yes, exactly like that.

 

11\. Don’t forgive them. Don’t let them forgive you. Just—don’t.

 

12\. Pretend that redemption doesn’t exist: only regret, and a mother’s unforgiving gaze.

 

13\. Pretend, for years, that the only voice holed up inside your head is your own. Pretend that there was no one speaking insidious truths to you and half of the time you wanted to give in if only to hear something else. Pretend that the whispers did not feel like absolution, and then like retribution, and then like nothing at all. 

 

14\. Pretend that you could’ve been better. Pretend that you could’ve been saved before there was anything even to save, when you learned to bend pieces of the galaxy in your palms and your hands ached from all that you were holding. Pretend to have not seen the fear writ upon your parents’ faces as they sent you off; pretend to have not seen the fear writ upon your uncle’s face as he received you. Pretend that Skywalker, Solo, Organa, they’re just names, that yours was not just an echo of old ghosts and ideals, that you amounted to more than a boy carrying a dead man’s name and the legacy of the one who killed him. Pretend that you were never a boy to begin with. Just you. Always you.

 

15\. You can’t forget, even if you tried.


End file.
